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Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale

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Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale Exemplaria Medieval, Early Modern, Theory ISSN: 1041-2573 (Print) 1753-3074 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yexm20 “To Late for to Crie”: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale Nicole Nolan Sidhu To cite this article: Nicole Nolan Sidhu (2009) “To Late for to Crie”: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale , Exemplaria, 21:1, 3-23 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/175330709X372021 Published online: 18 Jul 2013. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 151 View related articles Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=yexm20 Download by: [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] Date: 06 March 2016, At: 19:31 exemplaria, Vol. 21 No. 1, Spring, 2009, 3–23 “To Late for to Crie”: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale Nicole Nolan Sidhu East Carolina University This article proposes that Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale is a fusion of classical legend plot with fabliau setting and characters. This fusion helps Chaucer push the fabliau beyond its own limits, allowing the Reeve’s Tale to reveal late medieval culture’s confl icting attitudes towards female desire and mas- culine control and thus to interrogate more fully the gender politics of the Knight’s classical romance. The article argues that because the Reeve’s Tale revises many of the traditional features of medieval obscene discourse — features that the Miller’s Tale embodies — it is a crucial part of Chaucer’s meditation on issues of gender and genre in Fragment One. keywords Ariadne, Chaucer, classical legend, fabliau, rape In the climactic episode of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, the clerk Aleyn, angry over Symkyn the miller’s theft of Cambridge grain, heads towards the bed of Symkyn’s daughter in search of “esement” (1.4179).1 The passage describing Aleyn’s approach is highly suggestive of rape: And up he rist, and by the wenche he crepte. Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 19:31 06 March 2016 This wenche lay uprighte and faste slepte Til he so ny was, er she myghte espie, That it had been to late for to crie, And shortly for to seyn, they were aton. 1.4193–7 The couple’s conversation the next morning, however, is all sweetness and light. Aleyn departs at dawn in a manner that evokes the courtly aube, calling Malyne “sweete wight” and vowing to be “thyn awen clerk” (1.4236; 4239). Malyne responds in kind, addressing Aleyn as “deere lemman” (1.4240) and revealing to him the location of a cake baked from the fl our Symkyn had stolen from the two young clerks © Exemplaria 2009 DOI 10.1179/175330709X372021 4 NICOLE NOLAN SIDHU the previous day. Her revelation clinches her father’s defeat: the two clerks scoop up the cake before escaping from the mill, leaving Symkyn beaten, cuckolded, and humiliated. The combination of disturbing brutality and comic high jinks that we see here and elsewhere in the Reeve’s Tale has presented a perennial challenge to scholars. Although the tale’s milieu and characters suggest comical fabliau trickery, it depicts extremes of brutality, desperation, and social anxiety that are unusual in the genre. As a result, critics have tended to dismiss the tale as a vengeful narrative by a bitter old man that signifi es the decline of morality or political resistance (Muscatine, 204; Patterson, 276). In an evaluation that typifi es decades of critical reactions to the tale, V. A. Kolve concludes that the Reeve “exhibits a fi erce insight into human behavior, but it is a perception without purpose or future; it is not on the side of life” (255).2 What has remained notably absent from most critical treatments of the Reeve’s Tale is an attempt to determine why Chaucer would have given this tale a place of honor as the third entry in the Canterbury contest and why he would have taken such obvious pains in writing it (almost everyone agrees that the tale is technically brilliant) if his sole intent was to signify decline. I wish to propose that the Reeve’s Tale is much more important to our understanding of Fragment One than scholars have heretofore understood. If the tale’s signifi cance has thus far been overlooked, it is because its most brilliant commentary is bound up with issues of gender whose pertinence to Fragment One has only recently been recognized.3 More than either of its forerunners in the fi rst fragment, the Reeve’s Tale confronts the paradoxical status of women’s desire in late-fourteenth-century English society, where Christian doctrine granting women’s right of consent in matters of marriage and sex runs up against a lineage-based social system that renders women both the objects and the vessels of male power. Although rape and the erotic rebellion of a daughter may at fi rst glance appear to be diametrically opposed events, they are unifi ed by their common concern with women’s exercise of free will. Both events form a trenchant critique of the Knight’s gender ideology. While the Knight’s obedient Emelye bypasses the problem of feminine desire by wanting everything that Theseus wants, the rebellious Malyne forces us to ask where mascu- line authority over women begins and ends. And while Theseus’ defense of the Argive widows expresses the chivalric belief that force in the right hands will always protect Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 19:31 06 March 2016 women, the assaults on Malyne and her mother expose how women are victimized by a patriarchal culture that accords high status to men who dominate through violence. Moreover, the connections Chaucer makes between the Reeve’s Tale women and male servants of the aristocracy suggest that his interest in women is also a metaphor for the plight of others who are subject to violent and powerful men.4 If the Reeve’s Tale is about gender politics and sexual violence, it is also very profoundly about the fabliau and the tradition of obscene comic discourse to which it belongs. Crucial to the tale’s ability to undercut the Knight’s aristocratic ideology are its signifi cant divergences from fabliau convention. In spite of the tale’s obvious DESIRE, POLITICS, AND CLASSICAL LEGEND IN THE REEVE’S TALE 5 debts to the fabliau, many of its events and characters are unusual in the Old French genre. One of the most fascinating features of the Reeve’s Tale — which has gone entirely unnoticed in previous criticism — is its extensive use of classical legend tropes. The tale’s suggestion of rape, its depiction of an all-consuming masculine competition for territorial control, and its betraying daughter, are far more charac- teristic of classical legend than they are of fabliau. In particular, the Reeve’s betraying Malyne gives the tale a close resemblance to the Ariadne legend, a narrative signifi cant for its account of Theseus’ youthful shortcomings. The success of the Reeve’s fabliau–classical legend fusion in posing hard questions of the Knight exposes the limitations of the Miller’s Tale and of obscene comic dis- course in general. It reveals that in spite of the Miller’s claim regarding the ability of “harlotrie” (1.3184) to “quite” the Knight’s Tale, obscene comic discourse is actually quite limited in its capacity to interrogate the central assumptions about gender, violence, and masculine authority that structure the Knight’s classical romance. The Reeve’s Tale’s interest in tracing the construction of gender across various discourses makes it a key text for feminist studies of Middle English and of Chaucer. Feminist scholarship on Fragment One has noted the similarity between the gender ideology of the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale (Lochrie; Hansen), but it has yet to consider the insights that Chaucer himself provides in Fragment One’s third tale. Nor have feminist scholars of Middle English fully come to terms with the gender politics of obscene comic discourse, in spite of obscene comedy’s prevalence in late medieval English texts and its famous (or infamous) construction of the unruly woman.5 Crucial to our understanding of obscenity in Middle English texts is the insight cultural studies has provided on the intimate connection between culture and social relations of power (Johnson, 76). When we place obscene discourse in the context of social power relations in the Middle Ages, we realize that it does not have the anti-authoritarian associations in medieval society that it often has in the modern West, an important difference that has gone largely unnoticed in Chaucer studies and that has, as a result, hampered our ability to understand Chaucer’s important critique of obscene comic discourse in Fragment One. The daughter’s rebellion: using Ariadne to “quite” the Knight and Downloaded by [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill] at 19:31 06 March 2016 the Miller The Reeve’s Tale is remarkable for having a large number of Continental analogues — including Boccaccio’s Decameron 9.6, and two German versions, Das Studentena- benteuer (“The Students’ Adventure”) and Irregang und Girregar (“Waywardwight and Lustymite”; Benson and Andersson, 116–22). Its closest analogues are two erotic fabliaux: Gombert et les deus clers (4.296; “Gombert and the Two Clerks”) and Le Meunier et les deus clers (7.89; “The Miller and the Two Clerks”).6 Famous as narratives of sexual license and trickery, the erotic fabliaux often portray a love triangle involving a husband, his wife, and her lover.
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